Mad Men

I met a mad man today.

When I first called him to tell him I was on the way to work on his refrigerator he informed me in no uncertain terms I was ahead of schedule. That he had an agreement with my office for a certain time frame, and that I was not to show up until then. The phone was slammed at the hang up.

I'm used to dealing with angry people. It's part of my job description to be a sounding board for the feeling ripped off among us. Yet even after dealing with angry people all my life, starting with my very own father who seemed angry all the time, impatient, demeaning, irritated and rude, I still get a knot in the pit of my stomach when I have to face hostility. When I have to deal with men who remind me of my Dad.

I've learned over time most people are not angry at me. Some people have been in the course of my life; in fact quite a few, in retrospect. But the average person I deal with as part of my job serving the general public just need someone to vomit their irritation upon.

A guy who goes around seething like a boiling cauldron beneath the surface is a ticking time bomb. The slightest thing will set him off into explosion. He wears his anger like a giant chip on his shoulder. You see him at the coffee shop fuming because the line is moving too slowly, then berates the cashier for slow service. He's in the fast lane weaving in and out of other drivers in a Type A-driven adrenaline rage to get ahead of everyone else.

And he's the quiet, plastic-smiled nice guy with the digging quip that feels like a put-down and probably is. The soft-spoken, dignified dude with an acid-laced tongue.

Eckhart Tolle teaches that anger and irritation in life are signposts that you are fighting the present moment. You are not accepting what is, but rather wishing things were different than what they are.

Your anger symptoms are not caused by the situation, or by other people. They arise from within you because your mind has judged that the present moment is unacceptable. That things should be different.

But there is no should be. There is only Now.

To deny what is happening in the moment with the longing that things should be different is only to create suffering for yourself. Things are not different. They are what they are. And when you suffer, you give expression to that suffering in the form of anger, irritation, depression, despair.

The mad man I met today, though well into mid-life, has not yet learned to live in the moment. He is missing out on whole chunks of his life because he is going around should-ing on everyone and everything.

But he taught me a valuable lesson. He taught me that I am learning to face such people, knot and all, with the inner peace that this is my reality this very moment. He is exactly who he is: wishing his personality were different would only create suffering for myself.

He's exactly what I need this point in time.

What To Do if You've Wrecked Your Life

Probably the biggest thing you'll ever face if you've wrecked your life is regret. Regret is the stinging acid that sends its corrosive poisons all through who you are. Regret eats you from the inside out, until you're little more than an empty shell of a person going through the motions of existence. But your soul is gone. Your light has been put out. 

Sometimes you feel shattered. Like something crashed inside, something tender and precious and fragile. You lay in broken shards, bleeding, wounded without so much as a bandage to staunch the bleeding. You bleed and bleed and bleed. This is regret. This is what it does to you. You lay awake asking ad infinitum why you did what you did. You plumb the depths of your mind for the answers  that never come.

If you've wrecked your life, there comes a time where you have to sit down and grieve. Just grieve. You have to let down the blinders that keep you from seeing all the damage you caused, and look at the horror full in the face. You have to accept total responsibility for what you did. You have to come to terms with the fact that yes, you are that kind of person that did that thing. That is exactly who you are. It wasn't a fluke. It wasn't an accident. It was you, doing what you wanted to do in the moment you did it.

So you grieve the fact you are capable of such destruction, of authoring such misery and pain. You grieve the brokenness you caused. You grieve the suffering you initiated. You grieve the reality of the fact that you cannot undo what you did. That you cannot take back time for a second chance at not doing it.

Then you must forgive yourself. Grieve first, forgive next. There is nothing to forgive if  you first don't come to terms with how you have wrecked things. Once you have, you can then forgive yourself. Forgiveness means you'll no longer hold what you did against yourself and punish yourself to the grave.

You can grieve your failure, forgive your behavior, but you must also seek  forgiveness from those you betrayed with your actions. You must sit down with them, look them in the eyes and plead for mercy. You must do everything in your power to demonstrate genuine remorse and seek to make restitution.

Then, perhaps, if you're fortunate, you can begin to rise from the wreckage. Fortunate if you don't have to go it alone. There has to be someone who loves you enough to believe in you enough to give you the gift of another chance.  There must be another soul, perhaps broken, too, who sees what you cannot possibly see in yourself for all your sorrow: a human life worth saving. Only then can you can rise and begin to hope again.
Find that one soul. If you can't, I'm broken, too. I'm here for you...